22: 5 ways to get your ADHD and creativity working together!

 

What are ADHD superpowers? (Transcript)

 

Katie  00:00

In this episode, we're gonna talk about the five ways to get your creative engines firing.

 

Katie  00:13

So it's Monday morning, you've sat down at your computer, you know that you have to post something on social media to inspire your audience, to get them to book on your calendar, to light a fire under their butts to buy your service or your product. And as you sit there with your fingers, tapping the keys of your laptop, not actually typing anything, you realize, fuck, I have no idea what to post. And we all go through this in our creative process for promoting our businesses, because it's really, really hard wearing multiple hats in a business. And especially when you're a solopreneur, and as a solopreneur with ADHD, it's hard to jump from one mode to another. So especially on those Monday mornings, where you're transitioning, hopefully from having rested and relaxed and recharged, jumping back into work can feel incredibly challenging. And especially when you have all this pressure on you to come up with something absolutely brilliant. That will get your followers your connections to want to finally click that link and book a call with you or buy your thing. And so there are five things that I like to use personally, to get those creative engines firing, I want to share them with you today. The beautiful thing about social media is that it is social. So you going onto social media and reading other people's posts and commenting on those posts and liking them and engaging is not only going to get you ideas, it's also going to wake up the algorithm so that when you finally post when you finally get sparked for that idea, it gets shown to more people. The first way that you can juice your creative goose is to go and read a crap tonne of other people's posts or watch a tonne of other people's videos. Because in watching them, A, you're going to engage on them. And B you're going to come up with different ideas for different posts that you can continue the conversation with. Now, when I train this to my clients, a lot of people are concerned that oh my gosh, well, what if someone feels like I'm stealing their idea. And I want to remind you that you being inspired by someone's post about how they got their very first job and what they learned there, unless you're ripping off their lessons, it's not going to be you ripping them off, you taking that idea and saying oh my gosh, I'm going to share about my first job and how I got it. And what I learned from that first job is going to be completely different. And also, if you're ever feeling squirmish, about this, you can absolutely tag them in the post and say, oh my gosh, my friend John Smith posted about X, Y, and Z, and it really inspired me today to share my story around this. And that is perfectly fine. Now you can read other people's posts, and I want you to give yourself full permission to read the posts of your competitors and the posts of your ideal clients. Right? Because in those posts, you're gonna get different ideas from your competitors, you're gonna see what is everyone else focusing on this week? Is there a different take, that I can take on what they're having a conversation about? It's funny how on social media, it happens sometimes that like groups of experts tend to have the same conversation at the same time. I can't tell you how many times I've had a brilliant idea for social media posts that would absolutely change lives, obviously. And I've gone online and someone else who's in my space is already kind of written it. It's like that creative spirit has visited multiple people because it wants to make sure that thing gets said. Now full permission. If someone else is writing about this, you can absolutely write about this. There's no one keeping tally of who used the idea first. And also if you notice a lot of people in your space are discussing something... Let's use the example of like the Will Smith incident from the Oscars last year, Will Smith went and slapped Chris Rock.

 

Katie  04:28

And everyone was talking about it. And they were all unpacking it for their own use. And all this stuff you going into the conversation and just offering a different viewpoint is going to be contrary enough to get you attention, but also on trend enough that you'll be part of the bigger conversation. And this doesn't have to be about current events. Also. Sometimes randomly, everyone's talking about how to do TikTok videos on LinkedIn. And you coming in with a different opinion or a different suggestion is going to be super helpful and is also going to help you stand out from the crowd. Now likewise, when you're looking at your ideal clients, when you're looking at the content that they're creating, one of the most beautiful things you can do is kind of see what are they interested in. Maybe one of your ideal clients has posted about wine tasting this past weekend. And how much fun it was to see friends and how great it was to taste all these different Cabernet Sauvignons, you can absolutely go on and post about something personal about your preferences when it comes to wine. Because remember, your ideal clients aren't out there scanning the interwebs for the most bland, boring, straightforward version of the person that does what you do, right. They're looking for people who they want to get to know. They're looking for people who they feel like our friends already, because that's who we like doing business with. There's a reason why companies when they hire a more diverse sales team, they actually increase their profits. Because when you have a more diverse sales team, people can choose to work with people who they feel connected to, who they feel get them, which opens up the door to so much business with markets that the typical white male Bro-ey sales team wouldn't be able to access. No offence to the white male bro-ey, guys. You're fine. So you want to read other people's content a gets sparked for ideas of what you can post and also see different ways that you can show that you're relatable. If you have ADHD, this can also get a little dangerous. Let's own death scrolling happens. Right. So if you have ADHD, and you're trying to read other people's content to get sparked for your idea, what I want you to do is set a timer around this. Set a timer for 15 minutes, just scroll and comment and read and engage. And if you don't have an idea, at the end of those 15 minutes, I want you to go for a walk. Because the point here is you need to get something you need to get those creative juices flowing. And if bombarding yourself with ideas isn't helping you need to go and clear your mind. That's the first way to get those creative engines firing on a Monday morning or on a day where you're not feeling particularly inspired. The second way is actually kind of fun. I'm a big fan of buying different like tarot decks, and inspirational decks and just like even like question, quiz games, and also prompt sheets for social media. Because when I'm not coming up with any good ideas, I can pull a card. And I can read the meaning behind it. And I can see what comes up for me. In fact, actually let me do this now. I'm going to just pick one, where's my tarot cards? Hold on. Yeah, this one, just hopped right out. Okay, so I just pulled the nine of wands. Let me see what that means. The nine of wands represents wisdom, perseverance, and the last stretch, you're almost there, you can see the finish line and at the last minute you are faced with another obstacle. This challenge can be seen as a setback or a test of your character. Expect the worst and protect yourself against the foreseeable attacks. Better to be prepared, then be sorry later. Throughout this journey, you have accumulated experience and gained enough wisdom to handle anything that is thrown your way. You've gained tools to deal with your inner struggles and you now have the confidence in your abilities to overcome and persevere. Trust in your strength and power to make it to the end. Learn from your mistakes so that you can navigate setbacks easily into the future. Challenges are difficult, but believe in your abilities to make it through, you can do it. Okay, so there are so many ideas that that one card sparks for me so I could talk about my own personal journey here. And a time where I felt like I was almost there. And something happened that completely threw me off track and how I recovered from it. I can also talk about how this happens for my clients, I can tell us like a vague-ified story that doesn't identify anyone about how one of my clients got to the point where they thought they had almost made it to that success point that they had mapped out for themselves. And then something got in the way, I can also just write an encouraging post that tells people to keep going even if those obstacles are popping up like Whack a Mole. But literally, our brains are meaning making machines. It's why we are so paranoid. It's why we can make up stories about why people don't like us, especially for folks with ADHD and we have rejection sensitivity to dysphoria. The reason we're so sensitive is because our brains are so good at making meaning out of random data. This is also the source of all the beautiful things in our world of poetry, of art of books that have symbolism and hidden meanings in them. This is where nuance comes from. Let your meaning making machine work in random areas. Pull cards from tarot decks and try to make up stories about it. Because I can guarantee you this deck has over 100 cards in it, I guarantee you any card I pulled out of this would have been relatable to my clients, any card I pulled out of here would have brought something up for me personally. If you're not witchy woowoo, you don't have to do tarot decks, you can absolutely get like those motivational cards, there's also, this may be a little a little across the line you can get... Another deck that I love using is the therapy deck, where it actually asks you questions a therapist would ask you and obviously with those you get vulnerable with them, you don't necessarily have to share your deepest, darkest secrets when you post those things online. But it does wake you up to different things that you can talk about. There are also some incredible creators who create prompts for different posts that you can do. And depending on your social media platform, you just want to go and see like who the experts are and what kinds of prompts they offer. The first person who comes to mind, I know I talk about her a lot Lea Turner, she has a tonne of prompts for people who are learning to post on LinkedIn for the first time. And I have that prompt sheet, sometimes I go to it, it's brilliant. It really does get the ideas flowing, you can also create your own prompt list. Because once you're creative, especially someone with ADHD, once those creative juices are flowing, you probably get a gazillion ideas, but you don't know what to do with them. One of the things I suggest to my clients is when you get one of those ideas, just email it to yourself or text it to yourself. So you always have a running list that you can refer back to. And the cool thing about this is that like even if you reuse the same idea over and over and over again, talking about a boss who made your life miserable. The unfortunate thing about our world is we probably have several of those. So you can write different stories every single time. But say you only had one boss who made your life miserable. Each time you write that post, it's going to be from a different perspective, it's going to be remembering a different example of how they made your life miserable. It's going to be pointing to different feelings that came up in you, it's going to be pointing to what it motivated you to do in the future. I don't know about the entrepreneurs who listen to this podcast, but I know every single miserable boss I ever had is one of the reasons that I run my own business today. Because I never want to have to work for assholes like that, again, you know who you are. Wouldn't it be funny if they listen to this podcast?

 

Katie  12:30

This is something that takes more consistent work if every time you talk to a client, every time you get on a sales call, anytime you're in a networking situation with people who could potentially work with you, I want you to keep track of the questions that they ask you. What is it that they're curious about? Now, I am notoriously bad about this. Because when I'm working with clients, like I am so engrossed in what they're wanting to accomplish, I'm not even thinking about my business. But sometimes when I do remember after the call, I'll just jot down what their main problems were. So a main problem could be Oh, my gosh, I'm, I feel like I'm screwing up my sales call. People have a lot of reasons why they don't want to work with me at the end. Why is that? And then I can do a post about what a sales objection is, and how it can prevent you from getting clients and what it usually means you're doing badly on that sales call. Another one is like the fear of dealing with trolls. One of the biggest fears that I forget that new business owners have is what happens if a troll shows up in my comments, and makes my life miserable. How do you, A, prevent that? And, B, when you can't prevent it because it's impossible, because it's the interwebs and they're just trolls everywhere, how do you deal with it? You can absolutely write a post about that. The other tip that you can use to approach writing about questions that get asked is you can say hey, listen, here are the top three questions that all my clients ask. And they all feel a tonne of shame around having to ask this because they feel like it's super basic and something that they're just missing. And I just want you all to know, if you're asking these questions, or you're wondering what the answers are, you're not alone. They don't train this shit in school. No one knows this stuff. And really the only thing that you're doing and expecting yourself to know the answers to these questions is just being a dick to yourself. So the point here is you don't even have to answer the question that you get asked most often, what you're doing these kinds of posts is you're just normalising that they're not expected to know the answers to this, that there are people like you out there in the world who specialise in this who know the answers and remind them that they did not come out of the uterus, knowing these things. They did not come out of the uterus knowing French or chemistry or advanced algebra, or how to make an omelette, all those things they had to learn from someone else. The fact that they're expecting themselves to know something that's so specialised that you do work here on this topic... like that's just crazy. And yet, it's so common that our clients hold themselves to that expectation. I just want to add here, I am such a huge fan of just normalising the struggle for people. Because oftentimes, our clients the reason they don't reach out for help, the reason they don't hire us, the reason they don't even go on to the interwebs, to find the answers is because they feel so much shame around not being able to do it themselves. And shame is such a shitty thing to hold people back, because they do it to themselves. And if we can just take one layer of shame off of them, that might make the difference in them being massively more successful, just letting them know that they're not the only one who struggles with this may be enough to help them move to that next step. So in talking about shame, I want to give the example of how you don't want to do this. Yesterday, I actually got tagged in a post on LinkedIn. The person who wrote this post is not a listener, but the person who tagged me was just to clarify a little confusing, and it got my hackles up immediately. Because it started off saying that a lot of this person's clients had ADHD. And they were business owners, and had when she looked at their back end systems, she always cringes. And this is not how you want to do this. Because what that does is it immediately set someone up for a shame spiral. If you have ADHD, I bet you probably attract clients who have ADHD. And one of the dark sides of having ADHD is we're constantly told as we're growing up what we're doing wrong, and what we could be doing better, and how we're screwing things up and how we didn't do this well enough and how we were late and how I did it and all the things that we've done wrong. The thing that can be massively triggering for us, and actually prevent us from ever seeking help, is seeing generalised criticisms like that on the internet. I saw this post and I wrote a comment and I immediately deleted it. Because I didn't want to be part of this conversation. And I also didn't want to comment, and not call this person out for being unkind. Because I imagine there are some folks with ADHD who probably saw that post and looked at their business or thought about how they do their taxes or their bookkeeping, or how they organise their client files and thought, Oh, God, like now I can never bring someone in to help me with this. Now I can never bring someone in because I don't want to think oh my gosh, they're cringing inside. They're thinking, how terrible is this? Because that's been our experience our whole fucking lives. Okay, so your takeaway should be normalise, make them feel like it's okay to ask for help. Do not shame. Deal cool. The fourth way that you can get inspiration for what you should be posting online is very similar to finding out what questions your ideal clients are asking. And that's going to this website called answerthepublic.com. If you haven't heard of this, you are so welcome. Go and have so much fun. Now, when you go to answer the public, you want to use one or two keywords that people would typically use to find you, or would typically use to get help with the thing that your service helps them on. So you put these keywords in. And it literally tells you all the questions that people typically ask most often on the Google machine about what you do. It's organised into different categories. You can go there, and you can see any question that people typically ask and you can just write a post that's answering it. Now the beautiful thing about this is if you use that question, so say you start off your post with what is an executive coach, your posts are going to be more likely to show up on the Google machine because you're answering that question directly. This is also a great place to go if you're writing a blog and you want it to show up on the Google machine when people search for answers around your work. And this is my go to tool. I would love it, if you use other tools like this. You don't mind going to weenie cast.com scrolling to the bottom and leaving a voicemail for us telling me other tools that you like to use. I am always looking for different tools to add to this belt that I offer my clients and to offer everyone who listens to this podcast.

 

Katie  19:17

Fifth tip! Dun dun dun. We're going to the devil of the internet, we're going to the dark place we're going to the place where people often sell their souls. Facebook. Not a huge fan of Facebook these days, for a lot of reasons, and I don't think I need to explain them here. But Facebook groups are a treasure trove for you to figure out what you need to post to get in touch with your ideal clients. So if you've sold a little corner of your soul and are still a member of Facebook, and then here's what I want you to do. I want you to go and find Facebook groups that have to do with what you do. So if you are a fitness coach for new moms, I want you to go find new mom groups. If you're a realtor in your area, you want to go to house searching groups. If you're a landscaper, I want you to go to gardeners groups, whatever it is that you do, I want you to find all the groups that you can possibly find that are relevant to your ideal clients have an audience that could become your client. So for instance, if your business is location based, and you can only work with people in a certain location, only go to groups that are really in that area. Because let's face it, if you're a landscaper, in Massachusetts, the things your clients are going to ask about are gonna be a little different than the clients in Florida, in Massachusetts, there's going to be different plants and fauna that you have to deal with. And in Florida, you're gonna have to deal with alligators. The homeowners who would be hiring, you are going to have different questions in different areas, and also can't hurt if you're in that group. If you answer some questions and people Facebook stalk you and find out that you're a landscaper, they may end up being your client without you doing any cold outreach or posting unnecessarily in that group. So whenever you're dry for ideas, and you don't know what to post, you can just go to these Facebook groups and just scroll on down and see what questions people are asking to see what topics they're posting about and what's happening in the comments. The best kinds of posts for these ideas are the ones where someone poses a problem and asks for advice on how to fix it. And then you get the pile on effect in the comments, where people like, Oh, my God, I have the same problem. But it's in this way, like commenting so I can see what like if anyone has an answer. Because oftentimes, people don't necessarily comment with the answer to the question. They comment, just saying, oh my god, I have that too. Those posts are the things that are going to get your ideal clients attention the most. Now again, because you have ADHD, and it can be really easy to get sucked down a wormhole, especially now that Facebook has reels. And you can just go down wormhole... My favourite wormhole on Facebook is all of the Graham Norton shorts, like Graham Norton with Judi Dench, I could watch that all day.

 

Katie  22:32

Apologise in advance for all the hours you're about to lose on your life. So my point being is you need to set a timer for this as well. Anytime you are going to social media to get ideas, because you can get so easily sucked into different topics or just being entertained, you getting sucked into something that's entertaining can make two hours go by like nothing. Now you're running a business, those two hours are incredibly precious to you. Whenever you're doing this, I want you to do quick scans, I want you to set a timer. And I want you to go with the first idea that comes up. Lastly, and this isn't another way for you to get creative ideas, I just want you to remember that you showing up is 90% of the game. You posting is going to remind people that you exist. And that is the bare minimum that you have to do as a business owner. Because remember, we don't have a marketing problem as business owners, especially when we're when we're solopreneurs or we have small businesses. Marketing isn't even in the sphere of what we're doing. What we're trying to do is be memorable. We don't have a marketing problem, we have a memorability problem. If we can make sure that the people out there in our audience, just remember that we exist, then we have won the game for the day. So even if you have no ideas, you have no idea what to post and you just find a random picture of a random ferret online and you go and post that that is great. Because when you post it, your little profile picture is still going to show up in their awareness. Your names, it's still going to show up on their feed. You know, they may see especially if you're on LinkedIn, they may see that first little bit of your header that tells them what you do. And then they're gonna have this added intrigue of like, why is this person posting a ferret? Is this their ferret? Did they get a pet ferret? Are they borrowing a ferret? Are they at a ferret convention? What the hell is with this ferret that they're posting about? By the way, this is something I actually do to my clients when they're having a dry spell. And they're really, really struggling with what they should be posting on social media, and they're overthinking it, and they're just getting super in their heads. I give them the nofap challenge. We set a goal for them of how many times they need to post in a week. And so it doesn't matter if they post four times on Sunday because last day of the week and they have to post four times. But if they miss one of those one of those times has to be a picture of a ferret with no explanation. And usually it works because no one wants to post pictures of ferrets for no reason. I don't know why. I think they're really funny. By the way, if you have any amazing ferret pictures, I want you to send them to me at katie@katiemcmanus.com I'd really appreciate it.

 

 

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